TruthOut10
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- Dec 3, 2012
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Republicans join the Left in calls for American prison reform but ignore the relevance of racism and social justice.
In a 2011 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Newt Gingrich said, There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential The criminal justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it. An advocacy group called Right on Crime is spearheading Republican efforts to demand more cost effective approaches that enhance public safety. Signatories to its statement of principles include, in addition to Gingrich, other notable Republicans like Jeb Bush and Grover Norquist. A recent Washington Monthly article celebrated the rights new focus on crime claiming it would put the nation on a path to a more rational and humane correctional system.
But by focusing on achieving a cost effective middle ground, Republican reform strategies end up eschewing the relevance of social justice and largely ignoring racial disparities and the disruptive social costs created by mass incarceration.
Justice and white supremacy
The travesty of mass incarceration and its devastating social effects and of the malfeasance of American jurisprudence cannot be measured purely in terms of economic rationality. It is an issue deeply entwined with long histories of racial oppression and white supremacy. True reform will require grappling with this larger problem.
A 1987 Supreme Court case illustrates what I mean when I say that the justice system is saturated with racism. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court declined to define the death penalty as racially discriminatory. The case involved the appeal of the death sentence for Warren McCleskey, a Georgia man convicted of armed robbery and the murder of a white policeman. In his appeal McCleskey cited research analysing 2000 Georgia homicides over an eight year period beginning in 1972 that found black defendants were nearly twice as likely to be sentenced to death as white defendants.
The research, described as the most sophisticated study of the criminal justice system in the 20th century, also found that the death sentence was applied 4.3 times more often when the murder victim was white. McCleskeys appeal (based upon the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection and the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment), argued that the death sentence was racially biased. Justice Powell, in the majority opinion, accepted the general validity of the data and the likelihood that race was a factor in death penalty cases, but wrote that in the specific case of Warren McCleskey there was no proof of the existence of purposeful discrimination.
In the analysis of Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the Supreme Courts decision in McCleskey upholds the constitutionality of the Georgia death penalty, even while it validates the data showing clear racial bias. Stevenson summed up the case by arguing that in McCleskey v. Kemp the Supreme Court viewed the problem of racial bias as too big to confront.
Indeed, in the majority opinion Justice Powell wrote that if we accepted McCleskey's claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced with similar claims as to other types of penaltyince McCleskey's claim relates to the race of his victim, other claims could apply with equally logical force to statistical disparities that correlate with the race or sex of other actors in the criminal justice system, such as defence attorneys or judges.
In effect, the Court declined to recognise that racism and white supremacy were factors in the administration of justice. The Court, Stevenson argued, said if we recognise disparities based on race in the administration of the death penalty its going to be just a matter of time before lawyers begin complaining about race disparities for other kinds of criminal offences
McCleskey v. Kemp powerfully reinforced white supremacy in the administration of justice by obscuring a long American history of systematic racial violence and oppression, and normalising racial bias and racial disparities in sentencing. Although the decision was a specific deliberation on racial bias and the death penalty, its logic clearly ramifies throughout the entire criminal justice system.
White supremacy and mass incarceration - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
In a 2011 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Newt Gingrich said, There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential The criminal justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it. An advocacy group called Right on Crime is spearheading Republican efforts to demand more cost effective approaches that enhance public safety. Signatories to its statement of principles include, in addition to Gingrich, other notable Republicans like Jeb Bush and Grover Norquist. A recent Washington Monthly article celebrated the rights new focus on crime claiming it would put the nation on a path to a more rational and humane correctional system.
But by focusing on achieving a cost effective middle ground, Republican reform strategies end up eschewing the relevance of social justice and largely ignoring racial disparities and the disruptive social costs created by mass incarceration.
Justice and white supremacy
The travesty of mass incarceration and its devastating social effects and of the malfeasance of American jurisprudence cannot be measured purely in terms of economic rationality. It is an issue deeply entwined with long histories of racial oppression and white supremacy. True reform will require grappling with this larger problem.
A 1987 Supreme Court case illustrates what I mean when I say that the justice system is saturated with racism. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court declined to define the death penalty as racially discriminatory. The case involved the appeal of the death sentence for Warren McCleskey, a Georgia man convicted of armed robbery and the murder of a white policeman. In his appeal McCleskey cited research analysing 2000 Georgia homicides over an eight year period beginning in 1972 that found black defendants were nearly twice as likely to be sentenced to death as white defendants.
The research, described as the most sophisticated study of the criminal justice system in the 20th century, also found that the death sentence was applied 4.3 times more often when the murder victim was white. McCleskeys appeal (based upon the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection and the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment), argued that the death sentence was racially biased. Justice Powell, in the majority opinion, accepted the general validity of the data and the likelihood that race was a factor in death penalty cases, but wrote that in the specific case of Warren McCleskey there was no proof of the existence of purposeful discrimination.
In the analysis of Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the Supreme Courts decision in McCleskey upholds the constitutionality of the Georgia death penalty, even while it validates the data showing clear racial bias. Stevenson summed up the case by arguing that in McCleskey v. Kemp the Supreme Court viewed the problem of racial bias as too big to confront.
Indeed, in the majority opinion Justice Powell wrote that if we accepted McCleskey's claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty
In effect, the Court declined to recognise that racism and white supremacy were factors in the administration of justice. The Court, Stevenson argued, said if we recognise disparities based on race in the administration of the death penalty its going to be just a matter of time before lawyers begin complaining about race disparities for other kinds of criminal offences
McCleskey v. Kemp powerfully reinforced white supremacy in the administration of justice by obscuring a long American history of systematic racial violence and oppression, and normalising racial bias and racial disparities in sentencing. Although the decision was a specific deliberation on racial bias and the death penalty, its logic clearly ramifies throughout the entire criminal justice system.
White supremacy and mass incarceration - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
